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Edit Expertise: Saving Time

Jul 1, 2006 12:02 PM, By Jan Ozer

New to Adobe Production Studio 2.0, Dynamic Link allows for inter-program editing without as much rendering.

One of the most significant advances in Adobe Production Studio 2.0 is Dynamic Link, which enables Encore and Premiere Pro to import unrendered After Effects compositions and edit them as if they were actual video files. Because Dynamic Link serves slightly different purposes for the two applications, I'll discuss them separately, covering Encore first.

Photoshop/After Effects/Encore

One significant use of Dynamic Link is to more easily allow a designer to create a menu in Photoshop, animate it in After Effects, and deploy it in Encore. While previous versions of After Effects could import a Photoshop file with layers intact and animate them, you had to render the file to import the results into Encore.

Although the rendering time for a 30-second menu isn't prohibitive, it does get old if you make small adjustments to the menu down the line, as happens often when you're producing a DVD. To make any changes to the After Effects composition with Dynamic Link, you select it in Encore's project window and choose Edit > Edit Original, and After Effects opens and loads the composition. When you save the project file in After Effects, Dynamic Link automatically updates the composition in Encore.

Operationally, you can either start a new After Effects composition from Encore or select Adobe Dynamic Link > Import After Effects Composition. Browse over and click the After Effects project file, and the dialog displays all compositions within the file so you can choose the proper target.

Once inside your Encore project window, the composition acts just like any rendered video file; in Figure 2, I'm using Encore's pickwhip to choose the file as the background video for the main menu. As you probably can guess, “main menu — Photoshop file” is both my main menu and the starting point for the After Effects composition.

As before, the After Effects composition is “dumb,” simply playing a video file with all linking logic sitting in the actual menu. From a design standpoint, this means that the last frame of the After Effects composition must match the controls on the actual menu — otherwise, there will be obvious shifting when the video stops playing and the static menu fully appears. The easiest way to accomplish this is to import the Photoshop file into After Effects, set the desired composition duration, then set key frames at the end of the composition for the final values the menu will use.

For example, in the Rene Marie menu in Figure 2, I imported the Photoshop file into After Effects, added the lens flare effect, and slowly faded in the text menu links. After setting the 20-second duration for the menu, I added key frames for all text buttons at the end of the composition with opacity values of 100 percent, then set earlier key frames with opacity values of 0 to create the fade effect. After applying the lens flare, I made sure that the final value for Flare brightness was 0, again so it would match the original Photoshop file exactly.

One caution about this technique: Encore has always enjoyed round-trip editing with Photoshop, making it extremely simple to edit the main menu file. However, be aware that changes to the Photoshop file made from within Encore don't flow through to the After Effects composition. Further, once you invoke round-trip editing in Photoshop, Encore makes all changes to an automatically created new file, not to the original Photoshop file (See the file name in Figure 3).

However, Encore doesn't update the name of the menu in the Project window, which still shows the name “main menu - Photoshop file.” This makes sense, because you haven't changed the menu within the Encore project — just the underlying file — though, it can be confusing if you're using that file as the starting point for your After Effects motion menu.

Fortunately, if you've based your After Effects composition on that Photoshop file, you have several options. You can manually update your After Effects project file for the changes to the Photoshop file or start over using the Create After Effects Composition command. This saves you from having to hunt down the actual PSD file that Encore has stored to your hard disk, and ensures that you're working with the very latest menu file.

Just to state the obvious, Dynamic Link's utility is not limited to motion menus; you can also insert After Effects compositions on timelines as regular DVD content, including adding chapter points, end actions, and all similar adjustments. When you render the DVD, Encore will use the After Effects rendering engine to produce the composition files, then continue authoring and burning. That way, after a long rendering cycle, you can return to a finished DVD rather than AVI or MPEG files rendered by After Effects that you then have to import into Encore to start the authoring process.

After Effects/Premiere Pro

Premiere Pro and After Effects share a lot of common functions, and there are many that After Effects simply does better — such as animating text, slow motion control, chromakey, noise removal, and scaling. For this reason, while I spend the overwhelming bulk of my editing time in Premiere Pro, I appreciate having easy access to After Effects.

In previous Production Studio versions, I could copy and paste timeline elements from Premiere to After Effects, apply filters there, and then copy them back to Premiere Pro. However, if any of the filters that I applied in After Effects weren't available in Premiere Pro, I'd get a simple message in the Effect Controls window: “Offline (filter unavailable).”

For most practical purposes, this meant rendering in After Effects, then replacing the content in Premiere Pro with the rendered version. Not only did this tend to break up my workflow, because rendering in After Effects makes even dual-processor workstations unusable for editing, it often lead to multiple rendering cycles and further workflow interruptions.

New in Production Studio 2.0 is the ability to import unrendered After Effects compositions into a Premiere Pro project, again via Dynamic Link. As with Encore, once inserted into the project, the After Effects composition looks and acts just like any other video file — even showing the audio waveforms.

You can apply any Premiere filters or other adjustments to the composition, or edit the composition in After Effects, with all changes flowing through to the Premiere Pro project. You can apply any After Effects filter to the project — not just those supported by Premiere Pro — and when the composition finally renders, it uses the After Effects engine, which means higher-quality scaling, finer speed control, and many other quality-oriented benefits.

Premiere Pro's Dynamic Link works much like Encore's; you can import an existing After Effects composition or start a new one from within Premiere. This makes it very easy to use Dynamic Link on the fly on critical segments within your project, such as the chromakey sequence shown in Figure 1.

What's next?

My wish list includes the ability to insert unrendered Premiere Pro sequences into Encore, and for Adobe to automatically update After Effects projects with changes to the PSD file upon which they are based.

But let's give credit where credit is due. Between Dynamic Link and other inter-application integration elements not covered in this article — such as roundtrip Photoshop file editing from Encore, the ability to import layered Photoshop files into After Effects and Premiere Pro, and the ability to edit Premiere Pro audio files with Audition — Production Studio provides real-world time savings that other suites simply can't match.

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© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.